Top 5 of basic SEO tools
April 17th, 2007 by Joost SchrierOne of the main concepts of web 2.0 is the fact that the internet is/can be a platform just like windows/mac/linux are. Many sites/companies are very much in line with this concept when they create the tools you can find, and use, on-line. Just to clarify here: I’m not talking about the fact that you can (illegally) download software, music and all sorts of other stuff. I’m talking about tools like Google’s webmaster tools, personalised homepages and the likes.
To make our work a lot easier we use a lot of these tools to a) help our clients with the SEO of their website and b) to help us work more efficient. In this post I would like to share some of the tools we’re using and why we’re using them.
The most important tool we use is not a web 2.0 tool per se, but it is the basis of SEO. This tool is the statistics tool of the website we happen to be working on. When we take care of the hosting of a website this includes Webtrends statistics (the on-demand version), but most of the bundled log file analyzers are pretty good. The first things we always look at are the average amount of visits per day, the search phrases used to find the website, the referrers (where did the visitors come from), the most visited pages and the error reports. You can learn so much from this data! Maybe we’ll talk about this in some more detail in another post.
Another great tool is the Google Webmaster Tool (www.google.com/webmasters/tools). All you need to do to use this tool is get a Google account, if you don’t have one already, add a small verification file in the root of your website and get analysing. The webmaster tools include the sitemap tool, page analysis, error reporting and robots.txt analysis, but the tools we use the most are the query stats and the external links tool.
The query stats tell you where a link to your website was shown when somebody searched for something. This does not mean they actually clicked it, it just shows the position. This tool is cool because it happens very often that Google thinks your website is relevant for a search phrase that you never thought of. You can use this information to improve your ranking on phrases that people are apparently searching for and gather some extra visitors from them.
The external links tool tells you which websites are linking to your website. If you use the link: function in Google you only get a few of the websites that are linking to you, but this tool shows you all pages that have links to your website (even the ones that have the rel=”nofollow” attribute). An invaluable tool when researching your incoming links.
Yahoo has a similar tool called the Site Explorer (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com). It has less functionality, but some cool features nonetheless.
The problem with RSS-feeds is the fact that you can’t see how many people have subscribed. To remedy this you can burn yor feed with Feedburner (www.feedburner.com). Feedburner gives you statistics about your subscribers, the amount of clickthroughs, feed readers used, etc..
I loved my feed reader, but I couldn’t use when I wasn’t on my own computer. The same goes for bookmarks, to-do lists, calendar, etc. Luckily today we have personalised homepages. We use personal homepages from Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) which allow you to add RSS feeds, bookmarks, calendars, search boxes and more to your own homepage. This homepage uses AJAX to increase usablility, is accessible from anywhere (if you don’t forget the password of course) and helps you organise your personal information flow.
A very useful piece of functionality is the ability to add pages to the homepage so you can further organise the information. I have feeds from my most read blogs, a to-do list and a search box on my homepage and extra pages with more feeds about SEO, web development and design. Everything is grouped by subject and easy to find.
